Edge of Darkness

Living in the Shadows

Session 05 - Explorer's Guide to Parenting

GM Note:

Aj finally joined us with his gunslinging human. One problem I’ve experienced in RPG’s is new player integration. Many GM’s try to wait for a ‘good spot’ to inject the new character and sometimes the player sits on the sidelines for an hour or two. Funk dat! Get them in at the start regardless of if it makes sense!

The session began with meeting Rabbit, a quickdraw holovid actor, and how he fits in with the rest of the crew. The last couple of films Rabbit worked on got picked up by the Rebel Alliance. They wound up putting an anti-Empire propaganda spin on them and started using them as recruitment videos. When the Empire caught wind of this, they started coming down on the studio hard. Rabbit spent his fortune and even owes a few favors for getting himself and others smuggled offworld. He has a couple of obligations: 5% owes some favors. 5% famous gunslinger.

Having just killed a slaver and liberated two Aleena child slaves, the party decides to casually leave the planet while chaos ensued. The first order of business is to payoff Woondau and pickup Rasmus on Exodus Station. So the party charts a course and tries to get to know their two new nervous guests during transit.

Kriv suggests that 42-0B check them out. 42 complies, holding up its fist full of needles in front of the scratched skull on its chest plate as he approaches the cowering children. Noticing their fear, he tries to explain that shots don’t hurt and demonstrates by jamming a needle into Kriv’s arm. Kriv cries out in pain and the two children flee in terror and hide somewhere in the ship. It is hours before they resurface, and Kriv doesn’t much more than their names Shra and Mishro.

The rest of the trip is uneventful. SV-3R parked the Neesh Nok on the outer hull of Exodus and the party goes in to find Woondau at his favorite drinking spot, the Bloody Womprat, a rough and tumble sports bar where a fight breaks out about once an hour. He is very pleased that the first thing they did was to pay him. He asks for a rundown of how the delivery run went and, while there may have been some truth stretching, he seems to buy their story. That’s about the time the fight broke out.

Some highlights: Kriv makes a beeline for Big Krunk and ineffectually wails on him for a couple of rounds. Aerin punches somebody but gets roughed up a bit for his troubles. Rabbit beans someone in the head from across the room with one of the hard as stone shot glasses. 42 heals someone, and SV-3R gets an alert that someone is trying to open the airlock… Who leaves children unattended in a space ship?!?!?!

SV-3R snatches Kriv up and runs toward the ship as fast as its legs will carry it. Kriv suits up for the space walk while SV-3R runs out into the vacuum of space. Luckily the kids aren’t able to hack the lock open, but inside the ship is a wreck. Insulation and wires are pulled out of probably important locations and the ship’s supplies are strewn all over the place. Kriv yells for them to come out, but the abused children have no intentions of doing that.

Woondau doesn’t have work for the party right away since there is still some investigation going on at about the time the Neesh Nok left. Once that gets settled he might have something for them. So with no work and an increased desire to get these kids off the ship, the party goes back home to GX-176 to hopefully pawn them off on an Aleena farmer Kriv knows.

Rasmus isn’t too keen on having kids aboard, but they assure her they won’t be any trouble. Mishro colors a picture of Kriv dropping a grenade into the slaver’s pants, but other than that the kids are good for the remainder of the time.

They drop Rasmus off before heading to Emmer, a small farming outpost. The outpost doesn’t respond to hails and there is a suspicious lack of people as they set down on the landing slab. When they leave the ship, they party is greeted by a blaster bolt sailing over their heads. “You aren’t getting our harvest this time you filthy pirates!” someone calls out.

Aerin explains that they aren’t pirates and aren’t interested in stealing their harvest. Rabbit suggests that perhaps the group can deal with the outpost’s pirate problems.

Torok is Emmer’s leader, most of the community looks to him for guidance. He emerges from behind the crate and, speaking in a slow drawl, begins negotiating a deal for the party to take care of their pirate problem.

While that is going on, Kriv tracks down As’pa who was working on the comm array. She’s the outpost’s tinkerer and her prefab home is easily identifiable by the piles of junk and broken machinery outside.

He begins helping with the repairs and casually mentions some of the recent goings on. He casually talks about this mean old slaver, and casually speaks of rescuing two Aleena children from a horrible fate, and then casually suggests that a great place for them to grow up would be on a farm away from all that. Then he tries to casually walk out the door. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nothing doing! Emmer has a pirate problem so it’s not like they’d be safe here. Kriv offers to take care of the pirate problem if she’d agrees to take the children… and As’pa agrees.

The details of the deal are this: Deal with the pirates that show up and make sure the Komorav Brotherhood never messes with the farmers again. The Brotherhood is a small-time band of pirates ranging from 2-4 ships. They usually send one ship to take a load of processed nutrient paste around harvest time and they’re due to show up. In addition, Torok agrees to sell the party a load of the cargo at a discount.

The party puts their heads together and decides to set up an ambush for the pirates. The plan is pretty simple: Act like they’re complying with the pirate’s demands, plant a knockout bomb on their ship, and then ambush them. To attract the pirates to this particular outpost, they seed the holonet with a fake story about Emmer winning a biggest harvest of the year award. After that, it is just a matter of waiting.

About a week passes before the Black Pig shows up and the pirates come swaggering out for their cargo. The party plays along as helpless farmers and start loading crates under the watchful gaze of the pirates. At about the halfway point, the party puts their plan into motion.

Rabbit starts banging a crate around next to a couple of proton torpedoes that are laying around in the cargo hold of the Pig. Kriv identifies the crate with the bomb in it as the money crate and tries to take it back off the ship. One of the pirates stops him, opens up the crate, and then gets a face full of knockout gas.

Rabbit leaps into action. He rolls past the guard and hits the door controls closing the cargo door. The coughing twi’lek guard stitches a line of fire into the wall chasing behind him. Kriv winds up outside with the leader and sword lady, while Aerin is near the warehouse with the armed droid and SV-3R was hidden nearby in the powered-down Neesh Nok.

Combat ensues. A few highlights: Kriv receives a crit from a vibro blade, but manages to take down the swordswoman. The admin droid walks into Kriv’s shock trap and trades licks with Aerin. SV-3R misses his ship scale blaster shot on the pirate leader but rolls so much advantage that he blasts a hole through the cargo container and hit swordswoman lady with a burst of knockout gas. Rabbit gets the crap shot out of him and was down to 2 health when he succeeds in getting Fingers to surrender. Unaware of this, Kriv comes in and blasts the leader in the back of the head covering Rabbit in brain, skull bits, and blood.

GM Note:

Great first session for AJ. Welcome aboard! Despite feeling like I wasn’t very prepared, I think the game went pretty smoothly. A couple of things worth mentioning to AJ. I award bonus xp for anything that makes the game more enjoyable or my life easier as a DM. World development, ‘homework assignments’, and journal entries are some of the ways you can earn it.

So Rabbit was a holovid star? This might be the first death he’s witnessed. If so, think about how that might affect him. :)

Loot:

It’s been several sessions since you’ve acquired any serious loot so this might seem like a ton, but it isn’t.

Minus 2 Aleena children. So long as you follow through on their job.

Heavy Blaster

Vibro Knife

(2) Vibro-swords

Blaster Carbine

(2) Blaster Pistols

Slugthrower Rifle, 2.5 clips of ammunition

(2) Armored clothing

Prisoners:

Triz Dasha – Wounded and unconscious Zabrak Female

Female Twi’lek – Unconscious from poison gas

Human male – Unconscious from poison gas

Admin/combat droid – very damaged

Human male pilot – Unconscious from stun blaster

Very dead pirate leader

And 1 Nimbus Cargo Wing freighter named the Black Pig. Stats to be made available soon. It’s a speed 4 freighter and right now it has 2 laser cannons and 1 ion cannon for weapons.